Federal immigration reports: NC has no sanctuary cities
By Bertrand M. Gutiérrez BH Media 2 hrs ago
WINSTON-SALEM — On matters of illegal immigration, North Carolina is a very welcoming state to federal immigration authorities.
Local governments and law enforcement agencies in North Carolina allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents broad access to jails when ICE agents want to take someone into custody, according to recent reports by ICE.
And there is little chance that the much-debated Welcoming City resolution that was recently proposed and then withdrawn by Dan Besse, a Democratic member of the Winston-Salem City Council, would put Winston-Salem or Forsyth County in ICE’s report of uncooperative cities.
In its key yardstick for measuring a local government’s level of cooperation, ICE focuses on how local jails are run — whether a local sheriff keeps individuals in custody long enough for ICE to take them or whether the local sheriff releases such individuals without honoring ICE’s detainer request.
“The resolution would not have any effect,” Forsyth County Sheriff Bill Schatzman, a Republican up for re-election in 2018, said recently.
Schatzman honors ICE requests, he said, and the resolution would not have changed the way he cooperates with ICE.
President Donald Trump said he would crack down on sanctuary cities, threatening to block certain federal money from local governments that do not cooperate fully with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
One of the ways Trump has followed through on the promise was to order that ICE publicly list cities and counties that do not cooperate with ICE. Under Executive Order 13768, titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, and a subsequent memo by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, ICE Director Thomas Homan must make the report public.
The first report was released for the week of Jan. 28 to Feb. 3; the latest covers the week of Feb. 11 to Feb. 17.
On it are law enforcement agencies, counties, cities, boroughs and parishes in the United States that apparently did not honor a request from ICE that the law enforcement agency detain unauthorized immigrants so that ICE agents could pick them up.
In the latest weekly report, the Los Angeles County Jail in California was listed as having declined the most detainer requests — 78.
No city, county or local law enforcement agency in North Carolina has been named in any of the reports issued by ICE — except for one: the Richmond County Jail, run by Sheriff James Clemmons.
In the first version of ICE’s weekly reports, the Richmond County jail was listed as declining a detainer request from ICE for a convicted identity thief.
The detainer was issued Feb. 2, 2016, and declined on Feb. 3, 2017.
Contacted by a reporter, Clemmons, a Democrat who has won elections by wide margins, said he has no problem handing over unauthorized immigrants to ICE.
As it turns out, ICE made an error in listing Richmond County. In a subsequent correction, ICE said that “detainers appeared as being declined by Chester County, PA and Richmond County, NC when those detainers were incorrectly issued to those locations. The subjects of those detainers were in different locations.”
There’s a reason no North Carolina jurisdictions are in the ICE reports.
In 2015, state House Bill 318 was enacted, making North Carolina an anti-sanctuary state, said David Ray, a spokesman at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports capping overall immigration at 300,000, down from its current level of more than a million.
“Clearly, deterrence on the state level can make a real difference, and we hope other states follow their lead,” Ray said.
The American Civil Liberties Union has expressed concerns that, if left unchecked, the use of detainers by ICE could lead to civil rights violations.
“ICE’s use of detainers to imprison people without due process and, in many cases, without any charges pending or probable cause of any violation has raised serious constitutional concerns,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
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